SoroushVahidi/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Causal discovery and inference: concepts and recent methodological advances
(2016)

This paper aims to give a broad coverage of central concepts and principles involved in automated causal inference and emerging approaches to causal discovery from i.i.d data and from time series. After reviewing concepts including manipulations, causal models, sample predictive modeling, causal predictive modeling, and structural equation models, we present the constraint-based approach to causal discovery, which relies on the conditional independence relationships in the data, and discuss the assumptions underlying its validity. We then focus on causal discovery based on structural equations models, in which a key issue is the identifiability of the causal structure implied by appropriately defined structural equation models: in the two-variable case, under what conditions (and why) is the causal direction between the two variables identifiable? We show that the independence between the error term and causes, together with appropriate structural constraints on the structural equation, makes it possible. Next, we report some recent advances in causal discovery from time series. Assuming that the causal relations are linear with nonGaussian noise, we mention two problems which are traditionally difficult to solve, namely causal discovery from subsampled data and that in the presence of confounding time series. Finally, we list a number of open questions in the field of causal discovery and inference.
Learning to Reason With Adaptive Computation
(2016)

Multi-hop inference is necessary for machine learning systems to successfully solve tasks such as Recognising Textual Entailment and Machine Reading. In this work, we demonstrate the effectiveness of adaptive computation for learning the number of inference steps required for examples of different complexity and that learning the correct number of inference steps is difficult. We introduce the first model involving Adaptive Computation Time which provides a small performance benefit on top of a similar model without an adaptive component as well as enabling considerable insight into the reasoning process of the model.
Alignment of Monophonic and Polyphonic Music to a Score
(2001)

Music alignmentis the associationof eventsin a score with pointsin the time axisof an audio signal. Thesignal is thus segmentedaccording to theeventsin thescore. We proposea new methodology for automaticalignmentbasedon dynamic time warping, where the spectral peak structure is usedto computethe local distance, enhancedby a modelof attacks andof silence. Themethodologycancopewith performances consider eddifficult to align, like polyphonicmusic,trills, fast sequences, or multi-instrumentmusic.An optimisationof the representationof thealignmentpathmakesthemethodapplicableto long soundfiles, so that unit databasescan be fully automaticallysegmentedand labeled. On 708 sequencesof synthesisedmusic,weachievedanaverageoffsetof 18msand an error rateof 2.5%.
Adaptive Mixtures of Local Experts
(1991)

We present a new supervised learning procedure for systems composed of many separate networks, each of which learns to handle a subset of the complete set of training cases. The new procedure can be viewed either as a modular version of a multilayer supervised network, or as an associative version of competitive learning. It therefore provides a new link between these two apparently different approaches. We demonstrate that the learning procedure divides up a vowel discrimination task into appropriate subtasks, each of which can be solved by a very simple expert network.
Bayesian Methods for Mixtures of Experts
(1995)

Tony Robinson Cambridge University Engineering Department Cambridge CB2 1PZ England. Tel: [+44] 1223 332815 ajr@eng.cam.ac.uk We present a Bayesian framework for inferring the parameters of a mixture of experts model based on ensemble learning by variational free energy minimisation. The Bayesian approach avoids the over-fitting and noise level under-estimation problems of traditional maximum likelihood inference. We demonstrate these methods on artificial problems and sunspot time series prediction.
Neural Networks and the Bias/Variance Dilemma
(1992)

Feedforward neural networks trained by error backpropagation are examples of nonparametric regression estimators. We present a tutorial on nonparametric inference and its relation to neural networks, and we use the statistical viewpoint to highlight strengths and weaknesses of neural models. We illustrate the main points with some recognition experiments involving artificial data as well as handwritten numerals. In way of conclusion, we suggest that current-generation feedforward neural networks are largely inadequate for difficult problems in machine perception and machine learning, regardless of parallel-versus-serial hardware or other implementation issues. Furthermore, we suggest that the fundamental challenges in neural modeling are about representation rather than learning per se. This last point is supported by additional experiments with handwritten numerals.
The variational approximation for Bayesian inference
(2008)

The influence of this Thomas Bayes' work was immense. It was from here that "Bayesian" ideas first spread through the mathematical world, as Bayes's own article was ignored until 1780 and played no important role in scientific debate until the 20th century. It was also this article of Laplace's that introduced the mathematical techniques for the asymptotic analysis of posterior distributions that are still employed today. And it was here that the earliest example of optimum estimation can be found, the derivation and characterization of an estimator that minimized a particular measure of posterior expected loss. After more than two centuries, we mathematicians, statisticians cannot only recognize our roots in this masterpiece of our science, we can still learn from it.
A multi-objective artificial bee colony algorithm
(2012)

This work presents a multi-objective optimization method based on the artificial bee colony, called the MOABC, for optimizing problems with multiple objectives. The MOABC uses a grid-based approach to adaptively assess the Pareto frontmaintained in an external archive. The external archive is used to control the flying behaviours of the individuals and structuring the bee colony. The employed bees adjust their trajectories based on the non-dominated solutionsmaintained in the external archive. On the other hand, the onlooker bees select the food sources advertised by the employed bees to update their positions. The qualities of these food sources are computed based on the Pareto dominance notion. The scout bees are used by the MOABC to get rid of food sources with poor qualities. The proposed algorithm was evaluated on a set of standard test problems in comparison with other state-of-the-art algorithms. Experimental results indicate that the proposed approach is competitive compared to other algorithms considered in this work. © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Refining Geometry from Depth Sensors using IR Shading Images
(2016)

We propose a method to refine geometry of 3D meshes from a consumer level depth camera, e.g. Kinect, by exploiting shading cues captured from an infrared (IR) camera. A major benefit to using an IR camera instead of an RGB camera is that the IR images captured are narrow band images that filter out most undesired ambient light, which makes our system robust against natural indoor illumination. Moreover, for many natural objects with colorful textures in the visible spectrum, the subjects appear to have a uniform albedo in the IR spectrum. Based on our analyses on the IR projector light of the Kinect, we define a near light source IR shading model that describes the captured intensity as a function of surface normals, albedo, lighting direction, and distance between light source and surface points. To resolve the ambiguity in our model between the normals and distances, we utilize an initial 3D mesh from the Kinect fusion and multi-view information to reliably estimate surface details that were not captured and reconstructed by the Kinect fusion. Our approach directly operates on the mesh model for geometry refinement. We ran experiments on our algorithm for geometries captured by both the Kinect I and Kinect II, as the depth acquisition in Kinect I is based on a structured-light technique and that of the Kinect II is based on a time-of-flight technology. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated through several challenging real-world examples. We have also performed a user study to evaluate the quality of the mesh models before and after our refinements.
Receptive fields of single neurones in the cat's striate cortex.
(1959)

In the central nervous system the visual pathway from retina to striate cortex provides an opportunity to observe and compare single unit responses at several distinct levels. Patterns of light stimuli most effective in influencing units at one level may no longer be the most effective at the next. From differences in responses at successive stages in the pathway one may hope to gain some understanding of the part each stage plays in visual perception. By shining small spots of light on the light-adapted cat retina Kuffler (1953) showed that ganglion cells have concentric receptive fields, with an 'on' centre and an 'off ' periphery, or vice versa. The 'on' and 'off' areas within a receptive field were found to be mutually antagonistic, and a spot restricted to the centre of the field was more effective than one covering the whole receptive field (Barlow, FitzHugh & Kuffler, 1957). In the freely moving lightadapted cat it was found that the great majority of cortical cells studied gave little or no response to light stimuli covering most of the animal's visual field, whereas small spots shone in a restricted retinal region often evoked brisk responses (Hubel, 1959). A moving spot of light often produced stronger responses than a stationary one, and sometimes a moving spot gave more activation for one direction than for the opposite. The present investigation, made in acute preparations, includes a study of receptive fields of cells in the cat's striate cortex. Receptive fields of the cells considered in this paper were divided into separate excitatory and inhibitory ('on' and 'off') areas. In this respect they resembled retinal ganglion-cell receptive fields. However, the shape and arrangement of excitatory and inhibitory areas differed strikingly from the concentric pattern found in retinal ganglion cells. An attempt was made to correlate responses to moving stimuli
A handheld mirror simulation
(2003)

We present the design and construction of a handheld mirror simulation device. The perception of the world reflected through a mirror depends on the viewer's position with respect to the mirror and the 3-D geometry of the world. In order to simulate a real mirror on a computer screen, images of the observed world, consistent with the viewer's position, must be synthesized and displayed in realtime. Our system is build around a LCD screen manipulated by the user, a single camera fixed on the screen, and a tracking device. The continuous input video stream and tracker data is used to synthesize, in real-time, a continuous video stream displayed on the LCD screen. The synthesized video stream is a close approximation of what the user would see on the screen surface if it were a real mirror. Our system provides a generic interface for applications involving rich, first-person interaction, such as the Virtual Daguerreotype.
Magic decorator: automatic material suggestion for indoor digital scenes
(2015)

Assigning textures and materials within 3D scenes is a tedious and labor-intensive task. In this paper, we present Magic Decorator, a system that automatically generates material suggestions for 3D indoor scenes. To achieve this goal, we introduce local material rules, which describe typical material patterns for a small group of objects or parts, and global aesthetic rules, which account for the harmony among the entire set of colors in a specific scene. Both rules are obtained from collections of indoor scene images. We cast the problem of material suggestion as a combinatorial optimization considering both local material and global aesthetic rules. We have tested our system on various complex indoor scenes. A user study indicates that our system can automatically and efficiently produce a series of visually plausible material suggestions which are comparable to those produced by artists.
Efficiency Degradation in Wideband Power Amplifiers
(2018)

This paper addresses the efficiency degradation observed in wideband power amplifiers. It starts by presenting a detailed explanation that relates this observed performance degradation with the terminations at baseband. Then, a comparison between two implemented power amplifiers with the same fundamental and harmonic terminations, but with different baseband networks is presented, showing that an optimized bias network design can improve the observed efficiency degradation.
Generating Keyword Queries for Natural Language Queries to Alleviate Lexical Chasm Problem
(2018)

In recent years, the task of reformulating natural language queries has received considerable attention from both industry and academic communities. Because of the lexical chasm problem between natural language queries and web documents, if we directly use natural language queries as inputs for retrieval, the results are usually unsatisfactory. In this work, we formulated the task as a translation problem to convert natural language queries into keyword queries. Since the nature language queries users input are diverse and multi-faceted, general encoder-decoder models cannot effectively handle low-frequency words and out-of-vocabulary words. We propose a novel encoder-decoder method with two decoders: the pointer decoder firstly extracts query terms directly from the source text via copying mechanism, then the generator decoder generates query terms using two attention modules simultaneously considering the source text and extracted query terms. For evaluation and training, we also proposed a semi-automatic method to construct a large-scale dataset about natural language query-keyword query pairs. Experimental results on this dataset demonstrated that our model could achieve better performance than the previous state-of-the-art methods.
Customizing Computational Methods for Visual Analytics with Big Data
(2013)

The volume of available data has been growing exponentially, increasing data problem's complexity and obscurity. In response, visual analytics (VA) has gained attention, yet its solutions haven't scaled well for big data. Computational methods can improve VA's scalability by giving users compact, meaningful information about the input data. However, the significant computation time these methods require hinders real-time interactive visualization of big data. By addressing crucial discrepancies between these methods and VA regarding precision and convergence, researchers have proposed ways to customize them for VA. These approaches, which include low-precision computation and iteration-level interactive visualization, ensure real-time interactive VA for big data.
EW-SHOT L EARNING
(2016)

A recent approach to few-shot classification called matching networks has demonstrated the benefits of coupling metric learning with a training procedure that mimics test. This approach relies on an attention scheme that forms a distribution over all points in the support set, scaling poorly with its size. We propose a more streamlined approach, prototypical networks, that learns a metric space in which few-shot classification can be performed by computing Euclidean distances to prototype representations of each class, rather than individual points. Our method is competitive with state-of-the-art few-shot classification approaches while being much simpler and more scalable with the size of the support set. We empirically demonstrate the performance of our approach on the Omniglot and miniImageNet datasets. We further demonstrate that a similar idea can be used for zero-shot learning, where each class is described by a set of attributes, and achieve state-ofthe-art results on the Caltech UCSD bird dataset.
Setting Lower Bounds on Truthfulness
(2018)

We present general techniques for proving inapproximability results for several paradigmatic truthful multidimensional mechanism design problems. In particular, we demonstrate the strength of our techniques by exhibiting a lower bound of 2 − 1 m for the scheduling problem with m unrelated machines (formulated as a mechanism design problem in the seminal paper of Nisan and Ronen on Algorithmic Mechanism Design). Our lower bound applies to truthful randomized mechanisms, regardless of any computational assumptions on the running time of these mechanisms. Moreover, it holds even for the wider class of truthfulness-in-expectation mechanisms. This lower bound nearly matches the known 1.58606 randomized truthful upper bound for the case of two machines (a non-truthful FPTAS exists). Recently, Daskalakis and Weinberg [17] show that there is a polynomial-time 2approximately optimal Bayesian mechanism for makespan minimization for unrelated machines. We complement this result by showing an appropriate lower bound of 1.25 for deterministic incentive compatible Bayesian mechanisms. We then show an application of our techniques to the workload-minimization problem in networks. We prove our lower bounds for this problem in the inter-domain routing setting presented by Feigenbaum, Papadimitriou, Sami, and Shenker. Finally, we discuss several notions of non-utilitarian fairness (Max-Min fairness, Min-Max fairness, and envy minimization) and show how our techniques can be used to prove lower bounds for these notions. No lower bounds for truthful mechanisms in multidimensional probabilistic settings were previously known.1 ∗Computer Science Department, Technion, Haifa, Israel. ahumu@yahoo.com. †School of Computer Science and Engineering, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. schapiram@huji.ac.il. The current paper supersedes "Setting Lower Bounds on Truthfulness" that appeared as an extended abstract in the Proceedings of the 18th Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA07), pages 1143-1152, 2007. The current version includes a new lower bound result for Bayesian Incentive compatible Mechanisms.
A d–q Voltage Droop Control Method With Dynamically Phase-Shifted Phase-Locked Loop for Inverter Paralleling Without Any Communication Between Individual Inverters
(2017)

This paper presents a modified droop control method for equal load sharing of parallel-connected inverters, without any communication between individual inverters. Droop in <italic>d</italic>- and <italic>q</italic>-axis voltages are given depending upon <italic>d</italic>- and <italic>q</italic>-axis currents, respectively. Each inverter works in the voltage control mode, where it controls the filter capacitor voltage. Voltage references of each inverter come from <italic>d</italic>- and <italic>q</italic>-axis voltage droops. This <italic>d</italic>- and <italic>q</italic> -axis voltage droops force the parallel-connected inverters to share equal current and hence equal active and reactive power. A dynamically phase-shifted phase-locked loop (PLL) technique is locally designed for generating phase reference of each inverter. The phase angle between filter capacitor voltage vector and <italic>d</italic>-axis is dynamically adjusted with the change in <italic>q</italic>-axis inverter current to generate the phase reference of each inverter. The strategy has been verified with simulations and experiments and results are presented in this paper.
A Practical Approach to Insertion with Variable Socket Position Using Deep Reinforcement Learning
(2018)

Insertion is a challenging haptic and visual control problem with significant practical value for manufacturing. Existing approaches in the model-based robotics community can be highly effective when task geometry is known, but are complex and cumbersome to implement, and must be tailored to each individual problem by a qualified engineer. Within the learning community there is a long history of insertion research, but existing approaches are typically either too sample-inefficient to run on real robots, or assume access to high-level object features, e.g. socket pose. In this paper we show that relatively minor modifications to an off-the-shelf Deep-RL algorithm (DDPG), combined with a small number of human demonstrations, allows the robot to quickly learn to solve these tasks efficiently and robustly. Our approach requires no modeling or simulation, no parameterized search or alignment behaviors, no vision system aside from raw images, and no reward shaping. We evaluate our approach on a narrowclearance peg-insertion task and a deformable clip-insertion task, both of which include variability in the socket position. Our results show that these tasks can be solved reliably on the real robot in less than 10 minutes of interaction time, and that the resulting policies are robust to variance in the socket position and orientation.
LTE in the sky: trading off propagation benefits with interference costs for aerial nodes
(2016)

The popularity of unmanned aerial vehicles has exploded over the last few years, urgently demanding solutions to transfer large amounts of data from the UAV to the ground. Conversely, a control channel to the UAV is desired, in order to safely operate these vehicles remotely. This article analyzes the use of LTE for realizing this downlink data and uplink control. By means of measurements and simulations, we study the impact of interference and path loss when transmitting data to and from the UAV. Two scenarios are considered in which UAVs act as either base stations transmitting in downlink or UEs transmitting in uplink, and their impact on the respective downlink and uplink performance of an LTE ground network is analyzed. Both measurements and simulations are used to quantify such impact for a range of scenarios with varying altitude, distance from the base station, or UAV density. The measurement sets show that signal-to-interference ratio decreases up to 7 dB for UAVs at 150 m compared to ground users. Simulation results show that a UAV density of 10/km2 gives an average degradation of the signal-to-interference ratio of more than 6 dB. It is concluded that interference is going to be a major limiting factor when LTE enabled UAVs are introduced, and that strong technical solutions will have to be found.
Benign Osteoblastoma Involving Maxilla: A Case Report and Review of the Literature
(2012)

Background. Osteoblastoma is a rare benign tumor. This tumor is characterized by osteoid and bone formation with the presence of numerous osteoblasts. The lesion is more frequently seen in long bones and rarely involves maxilla and mandible. Due to its clinical and histological similarity with other bone tumors such as osteoid osteoma and fibro-osseous lesions, osteoblastoma presents a diagnostic dilemma. Case Report. Very few cases of osteoblastomas involving maxillofacial region have been reported in the literature. This case report involves osteoblastoma involving right maxilla in an 18-year-old male patient. Following detailed clinical examination, radiological interpretation, and histopathological diagnosis, surgical excision was performed. The patient was followed up for a period of 3 years and was disease free. Summary and Conclusion. Benign osteoblastoma involving jaw bones is a rare tumor. There is a close resemblance of this tumor with other lesions such as fibro-osseous lesions and odontogenic tumors and thus faces a diagnostic challenge. Surgical excision with a long-term follow-up gives good prognosis to this lesion-Benign Osteoblastoma.